


listen close: i'll tell you what i know

by monsterbate



Category: Arrow (TV 2012)
Genre: Exposition, Gen, Team Dynamics
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-12-12
Updated: 2013-12-12
Packaged: 2018-01-04 09:49:49
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,794
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1079520
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/monsterbate/pseuds/monsterbate
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>But she has this thing, you see, for puzzles. For solving for x. For understanding bugs and glitches and errors and things that do not work in the understood way. </p><p>Oliver Queen, the Hood, the vigilante, the man, is one of those things.</p>
            </blockquote>





	listen close: i'll tell you what i know

Felicity Smoak is not a fool. 

Sure, there are times when she’s gullible—Oliver Queen, ladies and gentlemen—and occasionally she’s a bit too trusting—see above—but she is intelligent. Smart. A genius, in fact, on some scales of intellect. 

The official story is this: Oliver Queen spent 5 years on a deserted island in the South China Sea and he, somehow, miraculously survived. 

The real story, Felicity suspects, is much more ridiculous. 

Of course, Oliver isn’t about to tell anyone about any of it. He’s all about keeping his secrets and wearing masks and ignoring basic questions about his well-being unless he’s drugged and/or severely injured. Otherwise: he’s locked up tight. The key’s probably still on that damned island.

But she has this thing, you see, for puzzles. For solving for x. For understanding bugs and glitches and errors and things that do not work in the understood way. 

Oliver Queen, the Hood, the vigilante, the man, is one of those things. 

And so she finds herself hoarding these tiny bits of knowledge—a name, an inflection, a phrase in Russian. Things that, on their own, are innocuous and innocent. But taken together, she has started to piece together what Oliver refuses to say.

 

**one**

“Listen, trust me: he’s been through a lot worse than this,” Diggle tells her that first night. It’s her introduction to the team and she’s got blood on her hands, and she knows what Diggle is saying is true. It’s obvious, seeing Oliver on that table: he has suffered. 

She’d seen pictures of Oliver Queen, the trust-fund playboy, from before—how could she not? When he’d come back, his photo had been plastered everywhere. And there had been a lot of topless shots. A lot. Not that she’d been looking, necessarily, but seriously: everywhere. 

And now… His body: the scars, the tattoos—they are a declaration in and of themselves. His bow, his agility—those, too, must be artifacts, souvenirs. 

He had not been alone on that island. And the people who’d been there with him had not been friendly. 

 

**two**

Three hours after Oliver has dinner at the restaurant that’s a front for the Triad, Felicity catches some chatter about a break-in over one of the telephone lines she was able to access. 

There wasn’t a lot of information: something about a Chinese man who asked too many questions, who knew too much, who poked his nose into Triad business. Keep an eye out, eliminate if found, etc. Most of it’s in Chinese, but she manages to use Queen Consolidated’s still-in-development translation software to get the jist of it.

Oliver never mentions anything about anyone else sneaking around the restaurant with him, and it hits her a week later, out of the blue, when he’s setting carryout containers on the corner of her desk: Oliver Queen speaks Chinese fluently enough that he can fool even the Triad. 

 

**three**

If he speaks Chinese, it must be because someone taught it to him. Someone who didn’t necessarily want to hurt him because if he’s fluent he knows more than the cadence of interrogation and pain, and that’s important. 

(It strikes her as odd that she now knows to think about what ‘the cadence of interrogation’ sounds like, but then working with Oliver Queen has never not been interesting.)

 

**four**

(And here’s another thing she never expected to learn: how to read pain. How to see a wound and know what it will look like once it’s healed. To understand how a pucker of skin was once a bullet hole, and how the weight of a punch will result in a smear of bruises. To tell when someone has been injured and does not want to admit weakness. She can treat a wide variety of punctures and contusions and sprains and now, every time she reaches for a bandage, she wonders what it was like for Oliver, curled around a new wound, bleeding and battered and unwilling.)

**  
five**

He has this box. 

It’s been sitting there since she first stumbled into the foundry; she’d noticed it while pacing and fiddling and waiting, and it seemed important. She’d started to open it—don’t tell Oliver—and Diggle had appeared at her elbow, a warning hand across the lid. “I wouldn’t,” he said, and there was a seriousness in his face that told her not to cross that line. 

She’s seen glimpses of things, in the box. After the Vertigo crisis she finds out about the 100% Natural Good Time Herb Solution, which is nice to know about. And after his fight with Malcolm, she sees the bow he keeps locked away. She imagines he retired it, after he returned; put it down because it had served him so well for so long. 

(The first chance she gets, she finds him a new bow because she has this theory that he doesn’t want to use that bow from the box for vigilante work. In reality, it’s less of a theory and more of a gut-feeling thing, but Diggle listens to her monologue on the subject and says he was thinking the same thing, so.)

Those items in the box are the things from the island that were worth saving, and she can’t help but wonder why, and how, and when. Who was it that taught him about those herbs, and what were they used to heal? Who showed him how to string a bow, and steady the arrow against his thumb the way he does? 

Who does he keep locked away, collected in bits and pieces in that box?

 

**six**

Ultimately, it’s Diggle who figures out where Oliver ran.

It’s not that Felicity doesn’t help—it’s that she doesn’t know how. None of the things she’d said to Oliver after the Undertaking had changed what had happened; nothing had stopped him from running. And now she’s out of words. 

So she shows Diggle how to use her compilation matrix, how to track a person from an airline boarding list to a cargo manifest; how to follow the breadcrumbs that lead away from Starling City. They find out a lot of things about the Oliver Queen from before (his penchant for brunette models; horrendous high school grades; a love of kung fu movies) and it’s like trailing a ghost through the woods who is moving away from them as quickly as he is able. And it hurts.

Diggle figures it out, in the end. He stops by her desk at Queen Consolidated and her heart is in her throat.

“I know where he is,” he says and he has a file an inch thick in his hands. “The island. Of course. I think it’s time we paid him a visit.”

She thinks about the things she’s learned about the island, about Oliver, and she nods. 

 

**seven**

The island is its own creature. She hadn’t realized it from the satellite images, from the news articles, from Oliver’s few mentions of it. But it breathes, in a way, waiting for you to fail, to flinch, so that it can consume you. It’s menacing, and grotesque, and she wonders what other secrets it keeps.

It lingers long after they’re back in Starling City, and she sees it, sometimes, when she closes her eyes.

She can only assume how it must haunt Oliver.

 

**eight**

When Oliver finally tells them about Sara—that Sara; lost Sara—Felicity realizes that even Oliver Queen can’t outrun his past. 

He wants to—he wants to put it so far behind him that it exists only as a faded, forgotten memory. But the island refuses to remain dormant: even now, it reaches out for him and recalibrates his trajectory, reorders his existence. 

And Sara Lance is a reminder of that island, a foreboding tropical breeze, bringing with her things that Oliver doesn’t want to acknowledge. She survived the wreck; she survived the island; she survived _him_ , and she, too, carries scars. (He blames himself for those scars.)

“Those were five years. Five years—where nothing good happened,” and his voice breaks. 

And she breaks a little, too. Because she has her confirmation: he has no good stories to tell. And he deserves so much better than that.

 

**nine**

Shortly after joining the team, Felicity gave the security system something of an overhaul. It was well overdue for a tune up, and, well, Felicity always gives 110%. 

So now there are listening devices, everywhere, in addition to the cameras, and auto-transcription devices, and she gets a complete data log sent to her phone every time someone is in the basement that hasn’t been added to The Approved List of Secret Keepers (which is currently her, Diggle, Oliver, and Tommy. Even though Tommy is—well, she doesn’t remove him from the The List. Hope, or something.).

The evening after she meets Sara, her phone goes off and she looks at the message without thinking, and there it is, waiting.

Oliver and Sara’s conversation; a back and forth of familiarity, of reminders, of history. She doesn’t mean to pry—as much as Felicity loves solving things, she also is loyal, to a fault—but she sees it without meaning to. 

_I remember the first time I saw that hood. Shado was wearing it._

And Felicity knows the hood is important to Oliver, and therefore, Shado is important to Oliver. 

Who Shado is—or was—is yet to be determined, but Felicity can be patient. 

(She doesn’t like being patient—see: Oliver Queen—but she can be if the situation calls for it.)

 

**ten**

The thing about Sara is that she gives Oliver a taste of his own secret-keeping medicine, and Felicity likes that.

 

**coda**

He tells Diggle he doesn’t want to keep his past buried. She finds out about it second-hand, over a Big Belly Burger, while Diggle’s staring down a milkshake and dealing with vodka hangover (the worst hangover of them all). 

She listens to the pieces: the names she hears like echoes, the wounds, the fear that is familiar. There were friends and enemies, a rescue and a disaster, hope and loss—a tragedy five years in the making. 

She has spent the past year carefully piecing together a history that is unspeakable. She has watched Oliver, and began to trust him, and learned to believe in him as a man and as a hero. She knows what happened on that island _matters_ , even if it was evil, even if it was horrific. It made him who he is, and so it is important. 

The specifics of his time there may not be directly at hand, but Felicity can hear it like a half-remembered hum, a song she cannot forget. Oliver Queen, and an island, and—

She knows the story already.


End file.
